Fortnite : more than 15 million Android downloads…without Google Play

Sep 10, 2018

No Google Play

In bringing Fortnite to Android this summer, Epic gambled that the biggest video game phenomenon in the world could find success without Google Play…Why avoid going through this service? Because Google Play recovers 30% of revenue, a tidy sum that was not ready to miss Epic Game

Epic reports 15 million Fortnite downloads and 23 million players on Android just 21 days after the game’s beta release ! In other words, the bet is won!

The iOS version of the game saw 11 million installations in its first month. It took the iOS version of Fortnite about three months to reach 100 million downloads

Android and technical issues

92 percent of Android Fortnite players are running Android 8 or newer. Despite working with the up-to-date software, the Fortnite team ran into a lot of headaches managing Android’s fragmented hardware universe…

Epic found that even freshly restarted phones only allowed 50 to 75 percent of their total memory to be allocated by the game. Apps running in the background could cause persistent memory headaches, too, especially since some of those apps would automatically restart after Android tried to reclaim their memory footprints.

Epic : ” The industry have had a decade to optimize and harden their implementations of OpenGL. Vulkan is a more complex API and will take some time to reach the same level of maturity. So far, Epic has instigated action on 47 unauthorized ‘Fortnite for Android’ websites, many of which appear to be run by the same bad actors.”

Did you download Fortnite on Android? Did it bother you not to go through Google Play?